end of quarter complaints: a trilogy

I

I may not be consciously aware that I'm anxious about the class that I'm teaching, but I woke up this morning aware that I had had a series of frustrating dreams all set in my classroom. The first was a fairly routine annoying-situation-dream: a colleague of mine was sitting in my class (she kept telling me before I began how good she expected it to be) and I couldn't find any of my handouts or notes for the day in my binder, which was full of old student assignments and syllabi. The second was a little weirder: my students turned in drafts of their paper, only many of them chose instead of completing the full five pages to write 1-2 pages and then finish their argument with an interpretive piece of abstract visual art (a.k.a. "a doodle"). I remembered getting very panicky in this dream, asking myself how I was ever going to comment on these drafts.

The final dream that I remember involved only four students since fifteen were absent. These were four of my best students, I remember, but in the dream they didn't want to talk about Dracula; they wanted to color on the whiteboard. And they demanded snacks. They had apparently abducted the minds of the third graders I taught last summer; it all made a lot of sense while I was sleeping.

II

A very stressed-looking student asked me last Thursday, when the final paper's drafts were due, whether she could have an extension and meet with me the next day to discuss her paper topic, which was confusing and frustrating her. I said sure, we could do that, and we met the next day for a meeting to which she brought no notes, no tentative thesis, nada. I tried to be as nice as I could, but I admitted I couldn't help her much until she did some more independent work that I could comment on. She promised to e-mail me that night. She did...with a request for an extension for her e-mail. She sounded upset and frustrated, so I said sure. She finally e-mailed me late last night (Sunday) with a tentative thesis and the beginning of a body paragraph. Because I myself was in the middle of writing a paper for a seminar, I put off responding to the e-mail (or going on the Internet, period) until late tonight.

When I signed in to respond to her e-mail, she had sent me an abrupt, angry note saying that she "guessed I just hadn't received her first e-mail" and implying that my comments were very late. I understand her frustration. I understand that I could have replied this morning when I checked my e-mail. But really, I'm not the one who's late here, right? Yet I'm the one who gets the angry e-mail instead of sympathy and an extension. Moreover, this is the kind of anecdote that tends to get blown out of proportion by students, which leads me to...

III

I HATE COURSE EVALUATIONS. I hate the fact that they stress me out. I hate that students sometimes circle zero on everything and only write the comment, "she was running ten minutes late once during conferences and I was late for my next class." I hate the fact that even if I receive 85 percent glowing evaluations, I only can remember the frustrated 15 percent.

*******

On the brighter side of things, today is the last Monday of the winter/spring quarter one-two punch. To which I say, to quote Napoleon Dynamite: yesssssssss.

(All appearances of this post aside, I'm actually in a really good mood. The air is warm and a week of vacation is so close I can almost gobble it up. Sleeping! Reading for fun! Getting a haircut! Hooray!)